V.I.
Lenin

MATERIALISM and EMPIRIO-CRITICISM

Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy

3. Is Motion Without Matter Conceivable?

The fact that philosophical idealism is attempting to make use
of the new physics, or that idealist conclusions are being drawn
from the latter, is due not to the discovery of new kinds of
substance and force, of matter and motion, but to the fact that
an attempt is being made to conceive motion without matter. And
it is the essence of this attempt which our Machians fail to
examine. They were unwilling to take account of Engels’
statement that “motion without matter is
unthinkable.” J. Dietzgen in 1869, in his The Nature
of tbe Workings of the Human Mind, expressed the same idea
as Engels, although, it is true, not without his usual muddled
attempts to “reconcile” materialism and
idealism. Let us leave aside these attempts, which are to a
large extent to be explained by the fact that Dietzgen is
arguing against Büchner’s non-dialectical
materialism, and let us examine Dietzgen’s own statements
on the question under consideration. He says: “They [the
idealists] want to have the general without the particular, mind
without matter, force without substance, science without
experience or material, the absolute without the relative”
(Das Wesen der menschlichen Kopfarbeit, 1903,
S. 108). Thus the endeavour to divorce motion from matter, force
from substance, Dietzgen associates with idealism, compares with
the endeavour to divorce thought from the
brain. “Liebig,” Dietzgen continues, “who is
especially fond of straying from his inductive science into the
field of speculation, says in the spirit of idealism:
‘force cannot be seen’” (p. 109). “The
spiritualist or the idealist believes in the spiritual,
i.e., ghostlike and inexplicable, nature of
force” (p. 110). “The antithesis between force and
matter is as old as the antithesis between idealism and
materialism” (p. 111). “Of course, there is no force
without matter, no matter without force; forceless matter and
matterless force are absurdities. If there are idealist natural
scientists who believe in the immaterial existence of forces, on
this point they are not natural scientists. . . but seers of
ghosts” (p. 114).

We thus see that scientists who were prepared to grant that
motion is conceivable without matter were to be encountered
forty years ago too, and that “on this point”
Dietzgen declared them to be seers of ghosts. What, then, is
the
connection between philosophical idealism and the divorce of
matter from motion, the separation of substance from force? Is
it not “more economical,” indeed, to conceive motion
without matter?

Let us imagine a consistent idealist who holds that the entire
world is his sensation, his idea, etc. (if we take
“nobody’s” sensation or idea, this changes
only the variety of philosophical idealism but not its
essence). The idealist would not even think of denying that the
world is motion, i.e., the motion of his thoughts,
ideas, sensations. The question as to what moves, the
idealist will reject and regard as absurd: what is taking place
is a change of his sensations, his ideas come and go, and
nothing more. Outside him there is nothing. “It
moves"—and that is all. It is impossible to conceive a
more “economical” way of thinking. And no proofs,
syllogisms, or definitions are capable of refuting the solipsist
if he consistently adheres to his view.

The fundamental distinction between the materialist and the
adherent of idealist philosophy consists in the fact that the
materialist regards sensation, perception, idea, and the mind of
man generally, as an image of objective reality. The world is
the movement of this objective reality reflected by our
consciousness. To the movement of ideas, perceptions, etc.,
there corresponds the movement of matter outside me. The concept
matter expresses nothing more than the objective reality which
is given us in sensation. Therefore, to divorce motion from
matter is equivalent to divorcing thought from objective
reality, or to divorcing my sensations from the external
world—in a word, it is to go over to idealism. The trick
which is usually performed in denying matter, and in assuming
motion without matter, consists in ignoring the relation of
matter to thought. The question is presented as though this
relation did not exist, but in reality it is introduced
surreptitiously; at the beginning of the argument it remains
unexpressed, but subsequently crops up more or less
imperceptibly.

Matter has disappeared, they tell us, wishing from this to draw
epistemological conclusions. But has thought remained?—we
ask. If not, if with the disappearance of matter thought has
also disappeared, if with the disappearance
of the brain and
nervous system ideas and sensations, too, have
disappeared—then it follows that everything has
disappeared. And your argument has disappeared as a sample of
“thought” (or lack of thought)! But if it has
remained—if it is assumed that with the disappearance of
matter, thought (idea, sensation, etc.) does not disappear, then
you have surreptitiously gone over to the standpoint of
philosophical idealism. And this always happens with people who
wish, for “economy’s sake,” to conceive of
motion without matter, for tacitly, by the very fact
that they continue to argue, they are acknowledging the
existence of thought after the disappearance of
matter. This means that a very simple, or a very complex
philosophical idealism is taken as a basis; a very simple one,
if it is a case of frank solipsism (I exist, and the
world is only my sensation); a very complex one, if
instead of the thought, ideas and sensations of a living person,
a dead abstraction is posited, that is, nobody’s thought,
nobody’s idea, nobody’s sensation, but thought in
general (the Absolute Idea, the Universal Will, etc.), sensation
as an indeterminate “element,” the
“psychical,” which is substituted for the whole of
physical nature, etc., etc. Thousands of shades of varieties of
philosophical idealism are possible and it is always possible to
create a thousand and first shade; and to the author of this
thousand and first little system (empirio-monism, for example)
what distinguishes it from the rest may appear to be
momentous. From the standpoint of materialism, however, the
distinction is absolutely unessential. What is essential is the
point of departure. What is essential is that the attempt to
think of motion without matter smuggles in
thought divorced from matter—and that is
philosophical idealism.

Therefore, for example, the English Machian Karl Pearson, the
clearest and most consistent of the Machians, who is averse to
verbal trickery, directly begins the seventh chapter of his
book, devoted to “matter,” with the characteristic
heading “All things move—but only in
conception.” “It is therefore, for the sphere of
perception, idle to ask what moves and why it moves”
(The Grammar of Science, p. 243).

Therefore, too, in the case of Bogdanov, his philosophical
misadventures in fact began before his acquaintance with
Mach. They began from the moment he put his trust in the
assertion of the eminent chemist, but poor philosopher, Ostwald,
that motion can be thought of without matter. It is all the more
fitting to pause on this long-past episode in Bogdanov’s
philosophical development since it is impossible when speaking
of the connection between philosophical idealism and certain
trends in the new physics to ignore Ostwald’s
“energetics.”

“We have already said,” wrote Bogdanov in 1899,
“that the nineteenth century did not succeed in ultimately
ridding itself of the problem of ‘the immutable essence of
things.’ This essence, under the name of
‘matter,’ even holds an important place in the world
outlook of the foremost thinkers of the century”
(Fundamental Elements of the Historical Outlook on
Nature, p. 38).

We said that this is a sheer muddle. The recognition of the
objective reality of the outer world, the recognition of the
existence outside our mind of eternally moving and eternally
changing matter, is here confused with the recognition of the
immutable essence of things. It is hardly possible that Bogdanov
in 1899 did not rank Marx and Engels among the “foremost
thinkers.” But he obviously did not understand dialectical
materialism.

“. . . In the processes of nature two aspects are usually
still distinguished: matter and-its motion. It cannot be said
that the concept matter is distinguished by great clarity. It is
not easy to give a satisfactory answer to the
question—what is matter? It is defined as the ‘cause
of sensations’ or as the ‘permanent possibility of
sensation’; but it is evident that matter is here confused
with motion. . . .”

It is evident that Bogdanov is arguing incorrectly. Not only
does he confuse the materialist recognition of an objective
source of sensations (unclearly formulated in the words
“cause of sensations") with Mill’s agnostic
definition of matter as the permanent possibility of
sensation, but the chief error here is that the author, having
boldly approached the question of the existence or non-existence
of an objective source of sensations, abandons this question
half-way and jumps to another question, the question of the
existence or non-existence of matter without motion. The
idealist may regard the world as the movement of our
sensations (even
though “socially organised” and
“harmonised” to the highest degree); the materialist
regards the world as the movement of an objective source, of an
objective model of our sensations. The metaphysical,
i.e., anti-dialectical, materialist may accept the
existence of matter without motion (even though temporarily,
before “the first impulse,” etc.). The dialectical
materialist not only regards motion as an inseparable property
of matter, but rejects the simplified view of motion and so
forth.

“. . . The most exact definition would, perhaps, be the
following: ‘matter is what moves’; but this is as
devoid of content as though one were to say that matter is the
subject of a sentence, the predicate of which is
‘moves.’ The fact, most likely, is that in the epoch
of statics men were wont to see something necessarily solid in
the role of the subject, an ‘object,’ and such an
inconvenient thing for statical thought as ‘motion’
they were prepared to tolerate only as a predicate, as one of
the attributes of ‘matter.’”

This is something like the charge Akimov brought against the
Iskra-ists, namely, that their programme did not
contain the word proletariat in the nominative
case![2]
Whether we say the world is moving matter, or that the world is
material motion, makes no difference whatever.

“ . . . But energy must have a vehicle—say those who
believe in matter. Why?—asks Ostwald, and with
reason. Must nature necessarily consist of subject and
predicate?” (p. 39)

Ostwald’s answer, which so pleased Bogdanov in 1899, is
plain sophistry. Must our judgments necessarily consist of
electrons and ether?—one might retort to Ostwald. As a
matter of fact, the mental elimination from “nature”
of matter as the “subject” only implies the tacit
admission into philosophy of thought as the
“subject” (i.e., as the primary, the
starting point, independent of matter). Not the subject, but the
objective source of sensation is eliminated, and
sensation becomes the “subject,”
i.e., philosophy becomes Berke leian, no matter in what
trappings the word “sensation” is afterwards
decked. Ostwald endeavoured to avoid this inevitable
philosophical alternative (materialism or idealism) by an
indefinite use of the word “energy,” but this very
endeavour only once again goes to prove the futility of such
artifices. If energy is motion, you have only shifted
the
difficulty from the subject to the predicate, you have only
changed the question, does matter move? into the question, is
energy material? Does the transformation of energy take place
outside my mind, independently of man and mankind, or are these
only ideas, symbols, conventional signs, and so forth? And this
question proved fatal to the “energeticist”
philosophy, that attempt to disguise old epistemological errors
by a “new” terminology.

Here are examples of how the energeticist Ostwald got into a
muddle. In the preface to his Lectures on Natural
Philosophy[1]
he declares that he regards
“as a great gain the simple and natural removal of the old
difficulties in the way of uniting the concepts matter and
spirit by subordinating both to the concept energy.” This
is not a gain, but a loss, because the question whether
epistemological investigation (Ostwald does not clearly realise
that he is raising an epistemological and not a chemical issue!)
is to be conducted along materialist or idealist lines is not
being solved but is being confused by an arbitrary use of the
term “energy.” Of course, if we
“subordinate” both matter and mind to this concept,
the verbal annihilation of the antithesis is beyond
question, but the absurdity of the belief in sprites and
hobgoblins, for instance, is not removed by calling it
“energetics.” On page 394 of Ostwald’s
Lectures we read: “That all external events may
be presented as an interaction of energies can be most simply
explained if our mental processes are themselves energetic and
impose (aufprägen) this property of theirs on all
external phenornena.” This is pure idealism: it is not our
thought that reflects the transformation of energy in the
external world, but the external world that reflects a certain
“property” of our mind! The American philosopher
Hibben, pointing to this and similar passages in Ostwald’s
Lectures, aptly says that Ostwald “appears in a
Kantian disguise": the explicability of the phenomena of the
external world is deduced from the properties of our mind!
“It is obvious therefore,” says Hibben, “that
if the primary
concept of energy is so defined as to embrace
psychical phenomena, we have no longer the simple concept of
energy as understood and recognised in scientific circles or
among the Energetiker
themselves....”[J. G. Hibben, “The Theory of Energetics and
Its Philosophical Bearings,” The Monist,
Vol. XIII, No. 3, April 1903, pp. 329-30.]
The
transformation of energy is regarded by science as an objective
process independent of the minds of men and of the experience of
mankind, that is to say, it is regarded materialistically. And
by energy, Ostwald himself in many instances, probably in the
vast majority of instances, means material motion.

And this accounts for the remarkable phenomenon that Bogdanov, a
disciple of Ostwald, having become a disciple of Mach, began to
reproach Ostwald not because he does not adhere consistently to
a materialistic view of energy, but because he admits the
materialistic view of energy (and at times even takes it as his
basis). The materialists criticise Ostwald because he lapses
into idealism, because he attempts to reconcile materialism and
idealism. Bogdanov criticises Ostwald from the idealist
standpoint. In 1906 he wrote: “. . . Ostwald’s
energetics, hostile to atomism but for the rest closely akin to
the old materialism, enlisted my heartiest sympathy. I soon
noticed, however, an important contradiction in his
Naturphilosohhie : although he frequently emphasises
the purely methodological significance of the concept
‘energy,’ in a great number of instances he himself
fails to adhere to it. He every now and again converts
‘energy’ from a pure symbol of correlations between
the facts of experience into the substance of
experience, into the ‘world stuff’”
(Empirio-Monism, Bk. III, pp. xvi-xvii).

Energy is a pure symbol! After this Bogdanov may dispute as much
as he pleases with the “empirio-symbolist”
Yushkevich, with the “pure Machians,” the
empirio-criticists, etc.—from the standpoint of the
materialist it is a dispute between a man who believes in a
yellow devil and a man who believes in a green devil. For the
important thing is not the differences between Bogdanov and the
other Machians, but what they have in common, to wit: the
idealist interpretation of “experience” and
“energy,” the denial of objective reality,
adaptation to which constitutes human experience and the copying
of which constitutes the only scientific
“methodology” and scientific
“energetics.”

“It [Ostwald’s energetics] is indifferent to the
material of the world, it is fully compatible with both the old
materialism and pan-psychism” (i.e.,
philosophical idealism?) (p. xvii). And Bogdanov departed from
muddled energetics not by the materialist road but
by the idealist road. . . . “When energy is
represented as substance it is nothing but the old materialism
minus the absolute atoms—materialism with a correction in
the sense of the continuity of the existing”
(ibid.). Yes, Bogdanov left the “old”
materialism, i.e., the metaphysical materialism of the
scientists, not for dialectical materialism, which he
understood as little in 1906 as he did in 1899, but for idealism
and fideism; for no educated representative of modern fideism,
no immanentist, no “neo-criticist,” and so forth,
will object to the “methodological” conception of
energy, to its interpretation as a “pure symbol of
correlation of the facts of experience.” Take Paul Carus,
with whose mental make-up we have already become sufficiently
acquainted, and you will find that this Machian criticises
Ostwald in the very same way as Bogdanov :
“. . . Materialism and energetics are exactly in the same
predicament” (The Monist, Vol. XVII, 1907, No. 4,
p. 536). “We are very little helped by materialism when we
are told that everything is matter, that bodies are matter, and
that thoughts are merely a function of matter, and Professor
Ostwald’s energetics is not a whit better when it tells us
that matter is energy, and that the soul too is only a factor of
energy” (p. 533).

Ostwald’s energetics is a good example of how quickly a
“new” terminology becomes fashionable, and how
quickly it turns out that a somewhat altered mode of expression
can in no way eliminate fundamental philosophical questions and
fundamental philosophical trends. Both materialism and idealism
can be expressed in terms of “energetics” (more or
less consistently, of course) just as they can be expressed in
terms of “experience,” and the like. Energeticist
physics is a source of new idealist attempts to conceive motion
without matter—because of the disintegration of particles
of matter which hitherto had been accounted non-disintegrable
and because of the discovery of heretofore unknown forms of
material motion.

Notes

[2]Lenin is referring to a speech made at the Second Congress of
the R.S.D.L.P. by the “Economist” Akimov, who opposed the Party
programme put forward by Iskra, one of his arguments being that
in the programme the word “proletariat” occurred as the object,
not the subject, of the sentence.